There is a sort of numeric tragedy of perception that happens with app stores and other environments where a curator is filtering fraud but also sometimes nuking some good apps in the process.

As users, we only have any visibility into three numbers:

A. The number of good apps that make it through the filter. (True positives.)

B. The number of good apps that are caught by it. (False positives.)

C. The number of fraudulent apps that make it through the filter. (False negatives.)

B may be larger than C, leading to the perception that the filter does more harm than ngood. But we are getting caught in a base rate fallacy. To really understand the filter, we need one more number:

D. The number of fraudulent apps caught by the filter. (True negatives.)

My impression is that average people have no idea what a huge sea of garbage, fraud, and bad actors is swirling out there on the Internet. The number of bad people is relatively small, but the volume of malicious hot garbage they are able to spew out is incredibly large. I wouldn't be surprised if every false positive (a good app like the one here getting caught) was balanced by a thousand true negatives (bad apps being filtered out).

With rates like that, the filter is clearly vital. But we don't see the full picture, so we never really know.

One piece of anecdata we do have is what unfiltered ecosystems look like. And they seem to universally descend into roiling cesspits of porn, hate speech, warez, etc.

So while it's very important to continue being critical of gatekeepers because they wield disproportionate social power, it's also good to be mindful that they aren't all bad. Notice how these days hacking always seems to be about phishing or email attachments? Everyone seems to have forgotten the days when worms in executables downloaded from the web were a major attack vector. That dwindled because the major OSes put these filters in place.

As usual, when something is working like it's supposed to, people incorrectly think it's doing nothing at all.